BIKE CHECK: Aaron Hand’s Custom Marino.

April 20, 2012

I’m seeing more and more Marino bikes out there and they look great. Picking components is cool, but it’s so much more interesting to see what people are doing now that they can go COMPLETELY custom from the ground up. Check out Aaron’s Marino…

In the year that I have been playing I’ve gone through three bikes. The first bike I played on was a Fuji Sunfire that was too small for me, and was more than happy to give up once I found a new bike. My second bike was a Trek Antelope 800, which was a great bike that allowed me to slowly build up nicer parts. A few months back people in our club started talking about this Peruvian bike builder that was building custom frames for only $250. Several people in the club said that they would build one if they had the money or if they could just see one in person first or any other number of excuses. I was approaching the end of my first year of polo and I decided that I wanted to take the sport as serious as possible, so I decided to be the first in the club to test out a Custom Built Marino Bike.

I had a general idea of what I wanted for my custom bike but I didn’t know exactly how to get there. I knew I wanted something similar to the Joust but with, what I consider, upgrades. Not being the most knowledge person on bikes, I asked for the assistance of club member Tim Altnether, who was more than willing to help me out. He helped me take the Joust and pull in the wheel base a bit, change a few angles, and change a couple other things so that the idea in my head could be a real bike. I sent my ideas to Marino and he drew it up for me on Bike Cad so I could see it in real life. Marino was great to work with in the process. He was quick to respond to any questions I had and he always double checked before going to the next step of the process. All in all it was definitely worth it for a custom bike from a great man named Marino.